My paintings explore the history and philosophy of humanity, discovering meaning in the things we do and the objects we create, finding the essence of what drives us to individually or collectively produce a body of work for the next generation of people to contend with. My major work consists of complex large-scale, figurative compositions, focusing mostly on American culture and its history, the exploration of the unfamiliar west and later its expansion and influence across the globe, especially on the convergence of American, Philippine, and Spanish histories at the turn of the 20th century. On the surface, my paintings are about historical, socio-political, and cultural knowledge, but essentially, they are more about jolting us out of our contemporary context in an attempt to visualize the complexity of the inevitable interweaving of many different cultures and the emerging qualities of their symbioses. The result is to hopefully help us reimagine what our localities and narratives of a historical present might mean in a much wider context of coexistence — to contemplate the interobjectivity of our personal experiences across time and space, and to realize how art brings it all together in this bigger picture of vicarious togetherness.